UPDATE: Finally (after 2 months) got New York's City Clerk to confirm what we suspected: Anoek Inbar was NOT registered to be an officiant. And when they contacted her to ask her to register, she did not respond in any way, and therefore, my marriage is not legal. The clerk told me there was no way to have my wedding "count."
This was a destination wedding, so I can't even go back and do it there. Plus, I may be pregnant already now. I'm heartbroken and devastated, but thankfully Texas has a common-law marriage provision that since we've been living as man and wife, they will give us an informal certificate of marriage backdated to our actual wedding day. It's all we can do.
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I can't tell you what a nightmare our officiant was. She seemed fine at our three meetings prior to the wedding. But on the wedding day:
1. She called me the wrong name during the ceremony--twice. I finally had to stop her and correct her.
2. People thought she was drunk or high. I'm sure she wasn't--but something was wrong. She was seriously loopy.
3. She forgot to sign the certificate--oh, and this gets better.
4. She gave us the certificate back without calling over the witnesses--sent it with my daughter. I didn't look at it until later and realized--nobody signed anything. Not her, not the groom and I. We got up the next morning and met the witnesses to sign. It clearly stated on the enveloped "OFFICIANT MUST MAIL WITHIN FIVE DAYS." I sent her an email to get her to sign it and she sent me back an email saying it was my fault because it was dark at the ceremony and I should have done it at a meeting prior to the wedding (even though I didn't have witnesses?)
5. I let her know I was calling City Hall (New York--and we don't live there, we were visiting for our wedding) to see if they could help our situation, and she got very upset and sent a long hateful email saying "Let's just get out of each other's lives." At this point we were not legally married, no way to get the license signed, and reconciled ourselves to having a second small ceremony at City Hall.
6. The groom realized he needed to step in and called her, calmed her down, and took a subway to her to get her to sign it. Upon looking at it one last time, we realized she had written the WRONG DATE on the form. We corrected it and mailed it ourselves.
I post this story to remind you how important the legal part can be!